5 Best Practices that Guarantee Cutover Excellence
What is the cutover plan and what is its purpose? Answering that requires a cutover definition and an understanding of the purpose of cutover activities and where these fit within your potential project. Below, we’ll explore what happens post the execution phase of your project, when we start focusing on implementation and the embedding of change elements, and the relationship between cutover and transition to business- as- usual. This is when the solutions developed and the data required to run them are migrated to replace your existing systems and newly designed processes that can utilise the new functions the new platforms enable, can be transitioned. Transitioning to business-as-usual actually means changing your business as usual wholly or in part without damaging or negatively impacting the natural flows of your business, operationally or otherwise.
Your change project and the benefits it delivers are only as good as the quality and completeness of its cutover and transition. The investment your business makes in new software and IT and the transformations hoped for are safeguarded and guaranteed by the detail in the planning of business transition to BAU (business as usual) and the cutover process. This is generally when projects tend to fail because the implementation phase is fraught with risk to business continuity and the morale of your staff.
What is the Project Cutover Phase?
The project cutover and transition phase is when the new process, people and data are migrated from all existing systems, processes and roles and responsibilities of the snapshot prevailing at the time of the project inception, to the target state and systems. Cutover migration is a common term by which this process is described, combining two critical activities that happen in parallel and are independent for business paradigm shift that is the business target, and it generally has a high potential for risk.
Cutover
Cutover is the act or a state of transition from one business state to a new, desired and state, normally of IT components into production and transition into Business-as-Usual, generally as part of the implementation phase of a project. Simply put, it’s when your projects go live in production. A project is structured in phases. Planning, Resourcing, Execution and Implementation. There are phases that deal with building the solution and testing it and others that deal with ‘installing it’, all generally done in a sandbox/preproduction environment which means that it reduces the risk on the production/BAU environment. The cutover phase is the time when the solution – IT and business elements are deployed into production and Business-as-Usual, so Cutover is an activity that happens to enable project go live.
What is a Cutover Plan?
The cutover plan and the transition strategy and implementation plans are primary tools for documenting the anticipated operational readiness risks and testing the risk mitigation strategies for cutover migration.
Why is Cutover Critical?
A cutover plan is necessary because of the risks to business continuity, and go live delay and ultimately project failure and proactive planning and management of cutover and transition can reduce the risks of failure and downtime.